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Analyze » Illuminate Education, Inc. » ILL1764633287

Incident Score: Analysis & Impact (ILL1764633287)

The details regarding individual company incidents & reports gives you full view from every side.

Rankiteo Score Impact Analysis

Rankiteo Incident Impact-121
Company Score Before Incident580 / 1000
Company Score After Incident459 / 1000
Company LinkView Illuminate Education, Inc. Profile
INCIDENT NUMBERILL1764633287
Type of Cyber IncidentBreach
ATTACK VECTORcompromised credentials, former employee account
DATA EXPOSEDemail addresses, mailing addresses, dates...
INCIDENT DATE31/12/2020
STATUSresolved (FTC proposed order issued)

Key Highlights From The Incident Analysis

  • Timeline of Illuminate Education, Inc.'s Breach and lateral movement inside company's environment.
  • Overview of affected data sets, including SSNs and PHI, and why they materially increase incident severity.
  • How Rankiteo’s incident engine converts technical details into a normalized incident score.
  • How this cyber incident impacts Illuminate Education, Inc. Rankiteo cyber scoring and cyber rating.
  • Rankiteo’s MITRE ATT&CK correlation analysis for this incident, with associated confidence level.

Full Incident Analysis Transcript

In this Rankiteo incident briefing, we review the Illuminate Education, Inc. breach identified under incident ID ILL1764633287.

The analysis begins with a detailed overview of Illuminate Education, Inc.'s information like the linkedin page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/illuminate-education, the number of followers: 14397, the industry type: Software Development and the number of employees: 81 employees

After the initial compromise, the video explains how Rankiteo's incident engine converts technical details into a normalized incident score. The incident score before the incident was 580 and after the incident was 459 with a difference of -121 which is could be a good indicator of the severity and impact of the incident.

In the next step of the video, we will analyze in more details the incident and the impact it had on Illuminate Education, Inc. and their customers.

On 18 September 2023, Illuminate Education disclosed data breach and unauthorized access issues under the banner "Illuminate Education Data Breach (2021)".

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced that Illuminate Education, an educational technology firm, was involved in a data breach where the personal data of 10 million students was compromised.

The disruption is felt across the environment, and exposing email addresses, mailing addresses and dates of birth, with nearly 10,000,000 records at risk.

In response, and began remediation that includes deletion of unnecessary data, implementation of a data security program and publicly available data retention schedule, and stakeholders are being briefed through FTC press release and proposed order notification.

The case underscores how resolved (FTC proposed order issued).

Finally, we try to match the incident with the MITRE ATT&CK framework to see if there is any correlation between the incident and the MITRE ATT&CK framework.

The MITRE ATT&CK framework is a knowledge base of techniques and sub-techniques that are used to describe the tactics and procedures of cyber adversaries. It is a powerful tool for understanding the threat landscape and for developing effective defense strategies.

MITRE ATT&CK® Correlation Analysis

Rankiteo's analysis has identified several MITRE ATT&CK tactics and techniques associated with this incident, each with varying levels of confidence based on available evidence. Under the Initial Access tactic, the analysis identified Valid Accounts: Cloud Accounts (T1078.004) with high confidence (95%), with evidence including hacker used the credentials of a former employee... to gain access to the company’s data systems, and compromised credentials, former employee account (attack_vector). Under the Persistence tactic, the analysis identified Account Manipulation: Additional Cloud Credentials (T1098.003) with moderate to high confidence (85%), with evidence including failure to deactivate former employee credentials (root_causes), and credentials of a former employee who’d left the company more than three years prior. Under the Privilege Escalation tactic, the analysis identified Valid Accounts (T1078) with high confidence (90%), with evidence including used the credentials of a former employee... to access sensitive data, and lack of credential rotation (vulnerability_exploited). Under the Defense Evasion tactic, the analysis identified Impair Defenses: Disable or Modify Cloud Firewall (T1562.001) with moderate to high confidence (75%), with evidence including failure to deploy ‘reasonable’ cloud security measures (FTC complaint), and inadequate cloud security measures (vulnerability_exploited) and Indicator Removal: File Deletion (T1070.004) with moderate confidence (60%), supported by evidence indicating deletion of unnecessary data (remediation_measures) *implied post-exfiltration cleanup*. Under the Credential Access tactic, the analysis identified Unsecured Credentials: Credentials In Files (T1552.001) with moderate to high confidence (80%), with evidence including failure to deactivate former employee accounts (vulnerability_exploited), and credentials of a former employee retained for >3 years. Under the Collection tactic, the analysis identified Data from Local System (T1005) with high confidence (95%), with evidence including accessed... email addresses, mailing addresses, dates of birth, student records and health information, and data exfiltration such as true. Under the Exfiltration tactic, the analysis identified Exfiltration Over Alternative Protocol: Exfiltration Over Unencrypted/Obfuscated Non-C2 Protocol (T1048.003) with high confidence (90%), with evidence including data exfiltration such as true (10M records including PII/PHI), and inadequate cloud security measures *implies unmonitored egress*. Under the Impact tactic, the analysis identified Data from Cloud Storage (T1530) with high confidence (95%), with evidence including personal data of 10 million students was compromised (PII/PHI/student records), and high sensitivity such as children’s medical diagnoses and Data Destruction (T1485) with lower confidence (30%), supported by evidence indicating deletion of unnecessary data (remediation) *possible post-exfiltration impact*. These correlations help security teams understand the attack chain and develop appropriate defensive measures based on the observed tactics and techniques.

Sources & References